By Paul E. Schindler Jr.

Some things are impossible to know, but it is impossible to know these things.

I no longer have a day job. I'm retired! So every word of this is my opinion, This offer IS void in Wisconsin. Except, of course, that some material in this column comes from incoming e-mail; such material is usually reproduced indented and in a serif typeface to distinguish it from the (somewhat) original material.

Faithless electors on Dec. 19 seem like a good idea, but aren't really likely, despite Hillary's popular vote lead.

Exit polls aren't perfect, but they sure raise some questions in an election where the electoral college victory was won with the votes of fewer people that you can find watching Ohio State play football on a Saturday.

A friend noted the work of Bob Fitrakis, Ph.D., J.D., who was an international election observer for the 1994 presidential election in El Salvador and co-wrote and edited the international observer's report for the United Nations. He was also a lead attorney in the Moss v. Bush election challenge in 2004 and is currrently suing the Edison Research Group regarding their practice of adjusting exit poll data in favor of improbable results.

Another reason for not mentioning Hitler in an argument is the risk of getting the reference wrong. My friend Kevin Mostyn wrote to correct my reminder that the German people elected Hitler, a cliche I was taught when I was quite young:

Strictly speaking, Hitler was not voted into power by the German people. The Nazis were elected as the largest party in the Reichstag, but they weren't the majority. Hitler was *appointed* Chancellor, not elected. Later, the Reichstag, not the people, gave him special powers, through the law called the Ermächtigungsgesetz [Enabling Act]. Those who would have voted against it where mostly excluded from the vote. Hitler took that law and ran with it. You know the rest of the story. But he was *not* elected by the German people, to rule Germany. Of course, while things were going well, they loved him.

I don't know if this makes my comparison better or worse. Donald Trump, who collected more primary votes than any Republican ever before, still collected a plurality, not a majority, of the votes.

I'm gobsmacked, to use a Briticism, which under the alien registration acts soon to be enacted I might no longer be allowed to do. Or might be required to do. It's unclear so far whether the thugs will impose mass deportations or enforced assimilation.

I might be getting a little overwrought, but make no mistake, this was a victory for the thugs. The kind of people who voted to quit the European Union are the same kind of people who drool and gibber at Trump rallies. They are largely the uneducated, the ignorant, and the mean-hearted. Above all, they hate and fear foreigners, and an inch below the surface, they hate and fear anybody different from themselves.

I'm going to have to sit and think for a while about what it all means.

From Amsterdam, I hear from another friend:

We don’t read all the Dutch newspapers in depth, but we haven’t seen anything that would lead us to believe there’s a signficant movement here to leave the EU. The only people pushing for it seem to be the ones who are anti-immigration, but they are not mainstream here. Most Dutch continue to have “welcoming” as part of their genetic makeup, and as they have for hundreds of years, they recognize that they’re way too small to go it alone. They were one of the founders of the EU and I can’t imagine them wanting to leave. Of course I couldn’t imagine Bush winning (twice) or Trump getting the nomination, so stranger things have happened. But that kind of stuff hasn’t happened here, and I like to think people here are fundamentally different than in the U.S. That’s certainly been our experience so far and one of the main reasons we feel at home here.

A friend in Seattle chimed in:

As a college history major back in the 1960s, one of my insights (it earned me an A+ on a paper) was that the United States seemed to be following Great Britain by 20-30 years in many respects. I think this still has some validity, and I am not encouraged by what I'm seeing.

There was this thought-provoking note from another friend:

In the 1820’s the five Central American republics created a short-lived union. The 20th century saw the United Arab Republic, which attempted to fuse Egypt, Syria and North Yemen. In our own country, the founders quickly saw problems with the Articles of Confederation and, going in the other direction, replaced them with a strong Constitution. Then four score and something years later, we fought a great war to establish the principle that there’s no getting out.

[I used to tell my students the United States is like the Hotel California; you can check in any time you like but you can never leave. No article 50 in the U.S. Constitution, no matter what Texas says.]

I have gone, in the space of 24 hours, from mildly optimistic about the future of my country to wildly pessimistic.

After all, if the Little Englanders can sleepwalk their country into an economic abyss because of fear of incipient Turkish immigration, what will the birthers in this country do out of fear of immigration, or of the 11 million undocumented immigrants already here? If I were living in England and were anything other than a Christian of Northern European descent, I would be very afraid today. Very afraid.

I think it is quite possible that European Council president Donald Tusk was right when he said, "As an historian I fear Brexit could be the beginning of the destruction of not only the EU but also Western political civilization in its entirety.” Or as Peter Venkman (Bill Murray) put it in Ghostbusters, after this vote there will be, “Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together... mass hysteria.” Part of me expected British institutions (700-800 years old, depending on whether you count the Magna Carta or Parliament) to prevent a disaster like this, much the same way many people hope our 228-year-old institutions will serve as a check, should the worst happen here in November. Assuming we make it to November without some disruptive upheaval.

It CAN happen here.

It DID happen there. I write this next paragraph in full recognition of the fact that I am about to validate Godwin’s law. I can only say any lesser analogy seems insufficient. According to Wikipedia:

Godwin's law is an Internet adage asserting that "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazism or Hitler approaches 1." That is, if an online discussion (regardless of topic or scope) goes on long enough, sooner or later someone will compare someone or something to Hitler or Nazism.

Remember, please, that Hitler was voted into power in Germany. There was no coup. The good people of Deutschland voluntarily placed a manifestly unfit man in charge of their country and paid a horrible price. They voted their fear and anger. I hope to God we will not do the same, but I now fear we will. These seem to be the times. We followed Thatcher with Reagan. Will we follow Brexit with...

I tried a 'serious' speech in my own multi-person primary for the Mass Boys State in the summer of 1968 which was held at UMass, Amherst. I had the misfortune to be from Town #1 and thus, spoke first. The remaining 11 speakers a) tore my speech apart (so much for introducing substance in an election where you only get to speak once), and b) were more humorous and memorable (admittedly, a lesson I learned the hard way). I did not get my party's nomination.

On the flip side, I did end up running for the Senate seat which was not chosen by a general election, but by a panel judging a written essays on addressing national and world problems. I was chosen as the #1 alternate.

Sometimes, the lessons we think we are learning turn out not to be the most large-scale lessons we could learn. For example, in 1976, two years after the events described, I wrote this:

Dignity? I proved I had none during my campaign for Ugliest Man On Campus, a charity campaign at MIT. It was fall of my senior year. It was not my idea to run really, although I certainly had the chance to withdraw if I wanted to. But the staff of the student newspaper, The Tech, entered me and knew I wouldn’t back down. My best fund-raising trick (I lacked the guts to walk around and ask people for money, I had to have a trick) was selling people a chance to throw a cream pie at me (actually, they were shaving cream, just like on television).

My then girlfriend thought it was an awfully cheap and undignified way to run the campaign and that it heaped unnecessary indignity on me. She also disliked the demeaning newspaper ad my managing editor ran several times in The Tech. She said somehow the other candidates managed to maintain their dignity and pride and I did not.

Do you see the lesson hidden in this story that is relevant to today? I do. In fact, I have been describing this incident for years as teaching me that retail politics work, wholesale politics don't. [It wasn't until I started typing up my 1976 journal that I realized I had thought, at the time, it was a lesson about dignity]. While I was running newspaper ads and holding [pie-throwing] "rallies" in the lobby of Building 10, my opponents were applying old-fashioned shoe leather, going from door to door asking people directly to put money in their tins. And I was beaten like a drum. In the years since, I have seen multiple political campaigns in which someone tries to win wholesale. Sometimes that happens. Usually, retail and personal wins in politics. I suspect that will happen again this year.

I don’t like mentioning the name of the GOP candidate, but if you’re interested you can listen to a discussion between Leon Neyfakh and Sasha Issenberg about his campaign, or rather, lack thereof.

It struck me because I am, for the most part, a huge fan of Scott Adams, the cartoonist behind Dilbert. He did a corporate gig at my former employer while he was still working a day job at Pacific Telephone, and he was brilliant. His comic strip is brilliant. His books are thought-provoking. And brilliant. For the last year, he’s been using his blog to tell anyone who will listen that the GOP candidate is a master persuader (just like Adams) and will win the general election in a landslide. It scares me because Adams is a genius.

But.

Sasha Issenberg, author of Victory Lab, The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns, makes some strong points in the podcast linked above. Specifically, U.S. general elections aren’t about persuasion they are about turnout. Adams says the GOP candidate will change all the rules and romp to victory. Issenberg wasn’t arguing directly with Adams, but noted that the Republican has 30 people in his field operation, while Clinton has 700.

What difference does that make? Clinton is preparing to mount a field operation to get out the vote. The man with the spray tan has eschewed such things as data-driven campaigning and get out the vote. He says he doesn’t need them.

Issenberg also noted that, in today’s hyper partisan political environment, only about 8 to 10% of the voters are actually persuadable. The rest of the voters make up their minds based on party affiliation and are immune to persuasion, or facts for that matter. Plus, he noted, if you have a get out the vote effort that is not done properly you will be getting out the vote for your opponent. Which is worse than no get out the vote effort at all.

Even if Adams is right, and Mr. Funnyhair persuades vast swaths of low-information, seldom-voting Americans to prefer him, it is useless if they don’t turn out at the polls. Again, this is the downside of wholesale politics versus retail (see article above). The candidate is not going to conclude each speech with, “Here are the deadlines to register to vote in all 50 states, and the hours the polls are open. Then I will read you a list of all 185,000 polling places. Listen for yours.”

Here are the numbers:

Voter Registration Statistics

Data

Total number of Americans eligible to vote

218,959,000

Total number of Americans registered to vote

146,311,000

Total number of Americans who voted in the 2012 Presidential election

126,144,000

Percent of Americans who voted in the 2012 Presidential election

57.5 %

Now, Ronald Reagan believed facts were stupid things (I have never believed that was a slip of the tongue), but facts are facts. A wholesale campaign, dependent on rallies of thousands and TV coverage of millions will reach 218 million people, of whom a third cannot vote. And 14% of those who can vote, won’t.

Do you even know where your polling place is? I don’t, but I know how to look it up, and I care enough to take the time to do so. In the Republican primary, the candidate was speaking to the fired-up and the converted. In the general election—not so much. All of his new fired-up independent and nominally Democratic voters may find, on election day, that they aren’t registered, don’t know the polling hours and can’t find their precinct. Election day isn’t even a holiday in the U.S., so some people have to take time off from work to vote. And some people can’t or won’t do that, especially the high-school educated angry white men that form the candidate’s core constituency.

This issue is particularly ironic for a Republican (if he really is a Republican) since it is Republicans who have led the nationwide effort to make voting harder, through such tactics as eliminating early voting, reducing the number of precincts and making registration harder. They will surely succeed in suppressing the votes of poor and minority voters. Alas for them, they will also suppress the votes of unenthusiastic white votes as well.

To get people to vote, you need a ground game. Not only does he who must not be named have no ground game, he says he thinks he doesn’t need one.

Adams is probably right about the master persuader. A majority of Americans may come to believe the GOP candidate should be our next president. But he actually becomes president only if a majority of the people who actually vote think he should win. And for that matter, only if a majority of people in the right states who actually vote think he should win (because Electoral College).

And while Adams says everything is different now, I’m betting on human nature. People are lazy (I am sure Adams would agree), and tend to do what they are told or asked to do. Hillary Clinton’s thousands of volunteers (who will be recruited by her 700 and growing field staff) will ask millions of people to vote for her. Mr. Funnyhair won’t ask because he doesn’t think he needs to. We shall see if he is right.

The last whistlestop tour in American politics was Robert Kennedy's trip from Portland to Eugene before the May 1968 Oregon Primary. The primary is also of interest because it was the first election a Kennedy ever lost.

An anecdote, widely reported at the time but not easily findable on the Internet, illustrates Bobby's problem:

U.S. Rep. Edith Green, Kennedy's Oregon campaign manager, was in a car with the Senator. "Take me to the ghetto," he requested. Mrs. Green took him to Oregon's only substantially black neighborhood, Albina in North Portland. As they cruised past streets full of tidy, well-kept homes and thriving businesses, he is reported to have put his head in his hands and said, "I'm doomed."

If you read almost any of the books that mention Bobby Kennedy's Oregon loss, they highlight Oregon's lack of poor and minority voters. I repeat the anecdote here so it will have an Internet presence.

Full disclosure: I was a Kennedy volunteer in Portland, Oregon. I was set to be taken to California by the campaign, but at the last minute, Kennedy aide William Vanden Heuvel said, "No one under 18 gets transported by the campaign." I was 16. I was out of luck.

The upper right corner of the nation used to be as reliably conservative as the upper left corner is now liberal. It was also a belleweather. "As Maine goes, so goes the nation," was the saying until 1936, when Franklin Roosevelt won 46 states. The new version was: "As Maine goes, so goes Vermont." In the years since, Maine has elected a couple of liberal, female, Republican senators. So what happened with their gubernatorial race this time, won by a mouth-breathing GOP type? A friend writes from New England:

Governor LePage was on track to lose the recent election except that a very liberal animal rights group put an anti-bear hunting initiative on the ballot. Most folks thought the Governor could only get re-elected if he got 40% of the vote (his likely maximum) and the third party candidate got at least 20%. The independent never got much above 10% and with 10 days to go released his voters, so everyone thought the Democratic challenger would win. He, however, showed poorly in the debates and then all of the bear hunting, gun owning, anarchistic, nihilistic, libertarians came out of the woods to vote against the bear referendum and while they were at the polls they voted Republican. The Governor got 48%. I talked with some politically connected friends in California and they said that could never happen there because the unions wouldn't let that kind of referendum on the ballot.

Something similar happened in California in 1982, when black LA mayor Tom Bradley lost to George Deukmejian in a gubernatorial race the polls said he was winning. Some people postulated "the Bradley effect," with people being unwilling to tell pollsters they weren't going to vote for a black man; I prefer the explanation that a handgun control ballot initiative on the ballot drew a whiter, more conservative electorate to the polls--the kind of electorate that created the Republican wave this year. I sincerely hope that the Koch brothers and their ilk never figure out that the path to GOP victory can be smoothed by drawing gun owners to the polls. If they do, we are going to be up to our asses in astro-turfed gun control initiatives.

On
The Sale/Dissolution Of The Commons"One
big reason governments are selling public assets to the rich is to
raise money to pay on government debts. Governments have debts because
they borrowed from the rich instead of taxing them. That, of course, is
the real scandal. But the rich want you to think it’s your fault so you
should pay, or forfeit all that juicy public property."

Recent Movies

Paul's Reading

Ann Patchett: This Is the Story of a Happy MarriageDavid Sedaris liked this book so much her arranged for Moe's Books of Berkeley to sell it in the lobby after his reading at Zellernbach Hall last year. I can see why; Pratchett is an interesting and able essayist. I haven't read her fiction, but if it is as good as her essays, it is good indeed. As a recently bereaved cat owner, I couldn't read her essay on the death of her dog, but all the others were fine. (*****)

Nora Ephron: The Most of Nora EphronI have always been a big fan of Nora Ephron, so I was enraptured with this omnibus, which includes her novel, her Harry met Sally screenplay and many of her essays, some of them previously uncorrected. They say you should never meet the authors you love, but I think I'd have enjoyed her, even if she was telling me to "get over it." (*****)

Edward St. Aubyn: Lost for Words: A NovelI heard the author on "Fresh Air" being interviewed by Terry Gross, and I am glad I did. I don't think I'd enjoy the Patrick Melrose books for which he is famous (based on the descriptions, I don't care to read them) but this relentlessly amusing sendup of the literary prize culture in Britain has laughs on every page, delivered with standard British panache. (*****)

Terry Pratchett's Discworld Books: Terry Pratchett has written 40 books about Discworld. I have read just over half of them, most recently Equal Rites. Everyone of them is hysterically funny and also makes a few comments about the world around us. His 2000 novel "The Truth" is one of the best journalism books ever written. He is a genius. (*****)

Dave Eggers: The Circle (Vintage)Finally, a novel of Silicon Valley with some literary merit. I have looked at the book club discussion questions, which make it clear to me that there's a whole lot going on I didn't get. But the parts I did get were a fascinating exploration of where we're going. As I used to teach students, "Science Fiction is not about what it is about, it is about the time in which it was written." True here. Marvelous and gripping. (*****)

Bob Garfield: BedfellowsCo-host of NPR's "On the Media" and Slate's "Lexicon Valley," Bob Garfield is a quick-witted, sharp-tongued commentator. This novel of the modern mafia in fictional Brooklyn is humorous and amusing (albeit not really laugh-out-loud funny), with a clever yet somehow contrived plot. Lots of swearing, not too much violence. I have read several books on my Sony E-reader; this is the first book I read on the Kindle I-phone ap. Weird experience. If you'd told me I'd ever read a book on my phone... (****)

Maria Semple: Where'd You Go, Bernadette: A NovelAnother case where "everybody" was right. All my print and electronic media sources pointed to this as a brilliant comic novel. Clearly, my analytical skills are deficient when it comes to print, because I can only repeat what I have written about several other books here: couldn't put it down. A mother-daughter tale, told mostly through documents and emails, and a delightfully barbed skewering of Seattle, one of America's most obvious and under-skewered targets. (*****)

Lionel Shriver: The New Republic: A NovelI am always on the outlook for the next "best journalism novel ever." For decades, Evelyn Waugh's Scoop was the gold standard, and it is still the funniest of the small handful of iconic novels that tell the truth about the life of journalists, particularly foreign correspondents. This, however, is a clever, well-written page turner that shows journos living the life I knew them to live when I was one decades ago. Plot contrivances? Sure. It was written before 9/11 and released this year, and if you didn't know you might guess. But just as Waugh's work caught the essence of the working journalist of his time, so too does this first rate novel. It deserves a place in the pantheon of "best journalism novels ever. (*****)

Danny Rubin: How To Write Groundhog DayRegular readers know I am a sucker for all things groundhog. Still, above and beyond my fan-boy inclinations, this is a great book by a talented author, which provides insight into both the movie and the process of writing it. I literally couldn't put it down. I wrote my second-ever Amazon review to praise it. Run, don't walk to buy a copy. (*****)